Tagged With sun

Like an endless blaze roaring forth from the gates of Hell, the solar wind is majestic, awe inspiring and terrifying. The only proof you need that the Sun is the one and true master of our solar system is this never-before-seen view of a torrent of charged particles bursting out of our star's corona.

If movies about space have taught us anything, it's that no one can hear you scream. If you get lost in space, nobody's going to find you. Unless you're a spacecraft with a direct link to NASA. Then there is hope for you yet.

After more than a week offline, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory — the sun-watching spacecraft responsible for these close-up images of solar flares, fire and loops — is back. But just what caused it to glitch in the first place?

Reminding us of our own fragile mortality, a large, bright comet just streaked across the sky and straight into our nearest neighbouring star. You will absolutely believe what happened next because it has happened to you in a nightmare, admit it.

Video: Turns out, all those movies about spaceships going just a liiiiittle bit off course and crashing into the sun were filthy, filthy lies. The good people over at Minute Physics explain why most of us couldn't crash into the sun if we tried.

Video: It always makes for a beautiful video whenever the suns lashes out with a solar flare. Here's one from earlier this month. You can see how electric its movement are — it just whips up and explodes. The footage was captured in different wavelengths and then colour coded so that we can see what's happening in better detail. In this case, in 4K detail.

A team of scientists has created a new, high-resolution model of the complex magnetic activity on the surface of the Sun. The result is as spellbinding as it is terrifying. Gaze into the roiling ball of plasma that supports everything you hold dear, and feel your sanity slip away.

At first, things could actually be rather beautiful: worldwide auroras! A brighter sun! But then things would rapidly get ugly, with the breakdown of communications, rolling power outages, and a burning away of the ozone.

Video: Yesterday was the vernal equinox, or the autumnal equinox for those of us in the southern hemisphere. You might think that it's simply the mid-point between each solstice, but that's not exactly correct. Joe Hanson, host of It's OK to be Smart, explains.

Image Cache: From our perch here on Earth, the sun seems pretty uniform from day to day. But a closer look in this new magnetic map reveals that it's teeming with activity — and with some intriguing bright spots.

Video: This is what the sun looks like over the course of a year. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the Sun and all of its fiery grace from 1 January 2015 to 28 January 2016. That beautiful burning orb looks unbelievable in this amount of detail.

It's taken half a century, but we're finally getting a handle on our Sun's complex magnetic field. A new model from NASA captures the strange surface interactions that create dramatic swirls of plasma and corneal mass ejections. If we can better understand the Sun's magnetic field, we might one day be able to predict when it will have an eruption triggering a solar storm.

Like camping, but can’t give up the gadgets and luxuries of home? Solar power can keep you going when off the grid. The team at Gizmodo Australia has rounded up 10 of the best solar powered gadgets available in Australia to help keep the electrons flowing next time you go camping.

By studying a nearby sun-like star, astronomers have concluded that the Sun is capable of releasing solar flares a thousand times greater than anything previously recorded. Scientists say the chances of this are quite slim, but warn that such an event would threaten life on Earth.

A rather massive coronal hole was recently spotted on the Sun by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The region — the size of 50 Earths — is spewing material into space at tremendous speeds. It may look terrifying, but astronomers say it's nothing to worry about.

The Earth, right now, is revolving around the sun at about 100,000km/h. But what would happen if we slowed to a stop? At that point, the planet would have exactly 64 1/2 days before it crashed into the sun. In this week's episode, we find out what would happen during those 64 1/2 days.